"O Jama shimasu," I apologized for being a bother, a standard
expression one says when visiting in Japan. It's a little more literally
true when one shows up unannounced to visit someone you haven't seen in
more than a decade and who may not remember you standing there inside
their home with a backpack and nowhere else to go. "Surprise," I
said meekly.

"Good! good!" Nanao said in English, "I like surprises!
Nothing happens here so we very much appreciate your bringing us a great
surprise!" He uses a lot of exclamation marks when he talks which
I'll omit as I find their excessive use on paper to be irritating.

Kenji stood by the door, letting me take care of myself. I announced my
name to remind Nanao. I hoped he would remember it, but I knew he'd
welcome anyone who walked through the door.

He repeated my name a few times with emphasis and throwing his head
back as if to reminisce, "Yes, yes, a great Zen man comes to visit.
You must stay and talk and drink." He looked pretty spry for
eighty-one – that’s what Hiro and Nado had said his age was. A
long-haired young man came down the packed dirt-floored hall and greeted
Kenji and was introduced to me as Nakagawa-san. He got out four cups but
Kenji begged out. I thanked him for his kindness, something I'd be doing a
lot of for the next two weeks, and he was off.

Nanao asked how long had it been and I said I thought that the last
time we'd met was at his trailer in the pine woods of Arroyo Seco, a
hamlet at 9000 feet on the side of a mountain above Taos, New Mexico. That
was more than twenty years past. I was on a late morning walk coming back
from waterfall viewing with a long-red bearded friend from the early
Tassajara days named Bob who worked at Dwayne Hopper's Western art gallery
called the Buffalo Dancer and with Dwayne's brother who owned another
gallery in Taos. I reminded Nanao he’d served the three of us green tea
on a stump table with stump chairs and when I’d asked him what he was
doing up there he’d said dramatically, "Some days I go to deep
mountain to chant Buddhist sutra. Sometimes I visit peyote road man. Some
days I wander around like a stupid fool."

"Do you still go to deep mountain to chant Buddhist sutra?" I
asked noting his sinewy frame. He looked as if he’d still be hard to
keep up with.

We went behind a curtain to a former pig sty now with a wooden floor,
wall hangings, a large low table, and an iron stove in front of which they
insisted I take a cushion – the honored position. The warmth of the
stove did a good job in countering the cold gusts that I assumed blew in
only through openings between the boards on the wall - until I noticed
later when I went outside to pee that there were rather large openings in
the walls of some sections on the opposite side of the hallway – large
enough for say, a pig to get through. I said it was sort of like the barn
I'd moved into back home but even funkier. "We are barn people,"
said Nanao.

"How's Ryuho doing," he asked?

Ah, hippie monk Ryuho Yamada. I shook my head and said, "Oh, he
has had cancer for some years now."

"Oh, that's too bad. What type?"

"Colon," I said. He didn't understand and I didn't know the
word in Japanese so I said, "shiri" patting my butt. Nanao
nodded and sighed.

I said that Clay and I had visited with Ryuho and his wife Mayumi in
Berkeley the night before we left on our trip to Texas back in July.
People were always taking care of Ryuho and for some reason they were
ensconsed in a wonderful old redwood mansion in the hills. I'd thought he
was in Carmel near Tassajara and intended to visit after our annual ten
days stint as students at Tassajara, but there I learned he was back in
the Bay Area so we drove back up to see him before continuing down south.
I suspected this was my last chance to see him. And Clay's. Clay had met
him before and found him intriguing. Ryuho was weak and thin, but in good
spirits and had lived much longer than anyone expected, the result, he
said, of all the years of physical and medicinal therapy and attention to
diet. I told Nanao he was probably not with us any more though I hadn't
received any word in emails. Nanao, Ryuho, and I had spent some time
together in walking around San Francisco and we made vague comments about
that.

There was shochu again and Nakagawa made us brown rice and vegetables
which we ate with chopsticks he’d made from local wood. And Nanao and I
talked about other people we'd known, including all those from the night
before with Hiro.

Nanao asked if I ever saw his best American friend, Gary Snyder, and I
said that we'd said hello when we bumped into each other and had spoken on
the phone a few times over the years when I had some question he could
answer about early California Zen history, but that was all. Nanao said
Snyder had visited him the year before but that they’d taken no long
hikes as they once did in the mountainous wilderness of California and
Alaska. He asked about Richard Baker and I said he was teaching in his
monastery in Crestone Colorado and in Germany about half and half, still
going strong despite some health problems, and married to a young German
princess.

"Oh, Baker Roshi married into royalty?" he asked.

"More like she married out of it."

"And how is Ryuho," he asked? It had been twenty minutes
since we'd talked about that and we'd been drinking a little bit and I
guessed it had slipped his mind.

"He has cancer, " I said. "He's had it a number of
years."

"What type of cancer?" he said concerned.

"Shiri," I said, patting my butt.

After this had happened a few more times, Nakagawa looked up at Nanao
and told him it was the fifth time we'd gone over this. Nanao wasn't
fazed. "Kenbosho," he said. "I have kenbosho." I asked
if that meant senility or Alzheimer's and he wasn't exactly sure. But he
was quite cheerful about it.

"Ah, kenbosho is very good," he said. "No need to
remember anything anyway. My mind is becoming more empty and free every
day! This is a very good thing. I like kenbosho very much."

Nakagawa's comment did seem to work though because Nanao didn't ask
about Ryuho again.

"Can you remember things further back pretty well," I asked?

"Little by little I forget everything, but I remember too much
still."

"Well then," I said, "How about telling me the story of
your life and let’s see how much you can remember. I interview people
for the oral history of the early Zen Center times when Suzuki Roshi was
alive. I don't have a tape recorder and I don't want to take notes but
I'll remember what's of critical importance for future generations."

"Very well," he said, "the story of my life. Hmm. What
is that? Let's see. In the beginning I was born a little innocent baby –
in Kagoshima. And even though Kagoshima is on the south end of Kyushu
which is the southernmost island of Japan – not counting Okinawa which
is Japan that is not Japan. Even though it was so hot there in Kagoshima,
it snowed quit a bit."

"It snowed in Kagoshima?"

"Yes, very great snow, very deep. And very gray."

"Oh," I said, realizing what he meant.

"The snow where I lived came from the mountain and not from the
sky and I would play in it and breath it as a boy." He went on.
"I have great respect for volcano and enjoy very much the volcanic
snow. It is more pervasive than snow from sky which melts. Sometimes for
weeks it was everywhere - all over the streets and cars and coming in the
homes and stores. Very stubborn. It gets into your motors and ball point
pens and underwear."

He went on. Even though he was not a bad student, at the age of twelve
Nanao decided not to go to the next level of school and, as it was not
uncommon for a young person to start a profession at that age, got a job
as an office boy in the local department of education. There he learned to
use the soroban which we call an abacus which is a Greek word. Wonder how
that came to be? They still use these in Japan and they tend to win
competitions over electronic calculators. Like nimble kids today with
computer games, he soon was able to move the beads on that ancient Asian
calculator with blurring speed. And he was accurate. In time he was
auditing the finances of all the schools around Kagoshima. The local
newspaper did an article on him. At sixteen he moved to Tokyo where he
continued to do office and soroban work.

Then at seventeen it was time for Nanao to go into the military which
all young men did at that age because Japan was engulfed by militarism –
had been so increasingly since before he was born. All he knew was Japan
and living in a society run by the army. He choose the navy which was the
most progressive branch of the armed forces. He was already feeling inside
the rise of anti-establishment sentiment and that was the best he could
do. He asked to be assigned to radar because he was interested in science
and had gathered that radar technicians got to learn a lot of science. His
wish was granted.

It was 1939 and Japanese forces were mainly in China, Taiwan, and
Korea, but before long they had attacked Pearl Harbor and invaded Malaysia
and Indonesia. Nanao was stationed somewhere on the southern island of
Kyushu where he had grown up. He would spend a great deal of time looking
at radar screens with nothing much happening. but eventually America
started to bomb them so his job became much more important and
interesting. But still he’d get stir crazy in his concrete underground
bunker just looking at that radar screen. So sometimes he’d take a break
and go outside – even when they were being bombed. Actually, that was
the easiest time to take a break because then he’d already told them
what was coming and from where and everyone would be busy shooting
antiaircraft guns or running for cover. If it was peaceful and sunny out,
say the type of day that would be perfect for a picnic of seaweed and
octopus, he’d have to be hunkered down in the bunker minding his screen.
Japan had become terribly stretched toward the end of the war so his
schedule was rather full, mainly consisting of being on duty and sleeping.

Most of the communication he had with others in those bunker hunkered
days was electronic – voice or codes over wires – and people were busy
dodging ordinance and having their world come to an end so no one paid
much attention when he started growing a beard. He was mostly by himself
looking at his screen, his beard growing and eventually becoming quite
long. Not all Japanese men can grow long beards but some can, due possibly
to an extra bit of Ainu blood (Ainu being the original and Caucasian
inhabitants of Japan who are the hairiest people on earth).

One day Nanao went out to get some sunlight and stretch his legs amidst
the crashing of bombs and cacophony of antiaircraft rounds and spraying of
machine gun bullets from strafing planes, all of which he’d become
accustomed to, when a small American fighter got so close to him that for
the briefest moment he could see the face of the pilot and the pilot had a
big red beard.

So there was Nanao with his long beard and the fighter pilot with his
long beard zooming close by and they looked at each other. And then the
pilot circled back around and swooped down even closer and they waved at
each other and he flew off – the pilot, not Nanao. But he’d too be
gone soon for the war was almost over.

I told Nanao that his story reminded me, except for all the bombs and
bullets, of an experience that Clay and I had driving into Death Valley
the previous February. It was ski week and I had taken him skiing, well
actually snowboarding, at other times, but the slopes would be sort of
busy then so we went to Death Valley which I love visit. On the way we
pulled off and drove down a rocky road to a vast scenic view of the
valley, not yet Death valley, below and the rocky sandy ridge way way
beyond and then Death Valley beyond that – and lots of wide sky. An
added bonus for guys like Clay and me of going to just about any desert in
America is that there are air bases nearby and testing grounds and stuffed
aliens and whatnot and on this particular day we could hear jets zooming
over and as we stood there looking over this extremely expansive valley
there was another one coming from the distance. Now the airplane that went
by Nanao was a lot more threatening than the one approaching us, but ours
was a fighter jet going at incredible speed. It went right over us and
then, swooping off to our right, circled way way around down into the
lowlands in the distance and then, returning upward across the mountain
ridge before us veered back and dipped down into the valley to our left
and it came right up where we were and almost seemed to hover within reach
for a second. It was a rare experience of astounding power and we could
almost see the pilot’s face but surely didn't as it happened so quickly
and noisily. It was so amazing and the pilot was obviously playing with
us. We waved.

After the war, Nanao returned to Tokyo and got a job in publishing and
worked there for a year or so and then, realizing he didn’t like that
sort of life, decided that he would rather live with the bums in Shinjuku.
So he did. He just quit working and started living out on the street. He
liked the people and the lifestyle there. He’d sit out on the sidewalk
or in a park and watch people go by and write poetry. And he’d walk. He
really got into walking and he walked and walked in the city and then he
walked out of the city. With Tokyo that takes a while. He walked on to the
next city and then to another and another. He kept it up for years and
went all over Japan, even visited Okinawa and eventually found a small
island that he liked for two reasons: it was almost uninhabited though
people came to visit and it was volcanic. Its name was Suwanose and there
he founded a commune and they built homes and farmed. I looked it up on
the Internet and found it was near Kagoshima where he was born (though I'd
thought he said it was near Okinawa). It has one of the most active
volcanoes on earth. They stopped an airport from being built there to
destroy the isolated natural beauty that the tourists in the planes would
come in to see. That's the first thing I remember hearing about him back
in the sixties before we'd met, and reading, I think, a poem he'd written
about it - that he was the founder of a hippie commune on an island in the
south of Japan and that they were trying to stop an airport from being
built there.

Nanao’s reputation spread and in the sixties when Allen Ginsberg went
to Kyoto to visit Gary Snyder, they were told they had to meet Nanao so
they did and they all became fast friends and they invited him to go to
America which he did. He spent about ten years in America – in San
Francisco and New Mexico and in the mountains and desserts. A friend of
mine who knows Nanao says that Nanao walked from New York to California
and back and forth a number of times and up to Alaska and so forth. All
the walking stories I've heard about Nanao seem to me to add up to more
miles than one could cover in a lifetime. But whatever he's walked, it's
been one whole heck of a lot.

Folks at the SF Zen Center got to know Nanao because he never had a
place of his own or any money so one of the communal houses near Zen
Center would take him in as an honored guest. But he just wrote poetry and
philosophized and didn’t tend to do the dishes so, after a while, he’d
be passed on to another Zen Center house or hippy commune. And he’d
write poetry and publish books and go to events like be-ins and concerts.
He didn't always get his way. Kyokes in Kyoto was working at an
environmental center on Yoshida mountain by the Yoshida shrine on the West
side of the city - the same place where landscaper and Nanao buddy Sogyu
is now. They were running a little hostel there a few years ago at quite
reasonable rates and Nanao showed up and wanted a room for free and
thought his name would do for legal tender but she said he'd have to pay
like everyone else so he went off and found somewhere else.

Nanao has visited the commune on Suwanose through the years and says
there are still about ten families living there and farming beneath the
volcano. He's traveled to Europe and to Asian countries other than Japan
and the South Seas. He’s been back to America. He was married a couple
of times and had many lovers through the years, has two sons in the
northern island of Hokkaido now and one who says he’s Nanao’s son who’s
in the Bay Area and who Nanao would be happy to meet. And he has a
daughter in Seattle who was due to have twins before long. He plans to
come visit in the spring of this year. Maybe his plane is landing now. Or
maybe he walked.

I told him I remembered a poem he had years before given me a photocopy
of that talked about how much environmental damage Japan had done to
itself - cementing creeks all over, cementing the coastline. I had an
image of the coast cemented but I said that I'd lived in Japan since then
and came to realize that he was probably talking in that poem about all
the tetrahedrons, or what we called tetrahedrons lining the beaches and
stacked out in the water to prevent erosion. A tetrahedron is a three
dimensional shape composed of four triangular faces, but somehow that came
to be what we called large cement forms of any shape that were piled in
the ocean - sometimes stretching straight out into the sea, sometimes
running along with the coastline. They were everywhere on Japan's
circumference. And so were cemented creeks and sides of rivers and dams in
creeks and rivers. A nation with unquestioned engineers gone crazy we
agreed. I told him that I'd long had the idea to create a coffee table
book of this phenomena. There were many different shapes and
configurations of the tetrahedrons. Some of the cement objects were like
jacks - star shaped. Maybe some were even tetrahedron shaped. I asked him
what the book should be called. We agreed on "The Way of
Cement." So the idea had started with just having a coffee table book
on the "tetrahedrons" along the coastline but had expanded into
cemented creeks, damns, sidewalks, buildings - all the many impressive
examples of how cement has been used in Japan.

Speaking of which means writing of books, Nanao has three poetry books
listed on Amazon.com: Let's Eat Stars,Break the Mirror: the
Poems of Nanao Sakaki (with illustrations by Gary Snyder)- out of
print, and Real Play: Poetry and Drama (Tooth of Times)-
out of print.He translated poems by Issa Kobayashi and that book
is called Inch by Inch: 45 Poems by Issa (La Alameda). There's
a book by Gary Lawless with many contributions from various people on
Nanao called Nanao or Never: Nanao Sakaki Walks Earth A. I don't
understand the "Earth A" part but the title gave me the idea for
the title of this piece. These
books are published by Blackberry except the two otherwise noted.

I gave Nanao a copy of To Shine One Corner of the World: Moments
with Shunryu Suzuki and of course signed it. It's a good book to give
foreigners because it's all little vignettes. I told him how I still
interviewed people for the oral history of the Suzuki days and that I'd
write up something on our conversation and put it on my web site. And I
asked him if he'd ever met Suzuki.

Nanao said, "Yes. I met him two times. Both times were at the Zen
Center on Page Street in San Francisco. The first time Richard Baker took
me. He introduced us. I said 'hi' and he said 'hi.'

"In English?"

"Yes. Everyone else was speaking English and we could too. And hi
is not so difficult English."

"Suzuki Roshi loved to say 'hi,'" I said. "He said it a
lot. I think it always had a little bit of the Japanese 'hai' in it - you
know, yes in Japanese. There was always a lot of hai yes and hi hello and
they were mixed together and had a sort of positive 'gambate,' go-for-it,
encouraging sort of feeling.

"Yes," he said, and repeated the word a few times. And then,
"Hello - we will do it!"

"So you said 'hi' and then?"

"That's all. Just hi. It was enough. I could see his great spirit
and he could see me. And the second time I met him was when he was dying.
Gary Snyder took me and we visited him. And we had exactly the same
conversation we'd had before. Just 'hi' and 'hi' and we bowed our heads a
little."

"So you and Suzuki Roshi had two meetings over the years and the
sum total of what you said to each other in both meetings was four words -
actually, one word four times?"

"Yes. It was just right. I am so happy to have met him. He was a
great teacher for America."